Qualcomm is giving phone makers more choice for their next generation of flagship devices, announcing not one but two new chips: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
Both are built on a 2nm process and use Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU architecture, with two 5GHz Prime cores and six 4GHz Performance cores. The standard Elite Gen 6 brings a 10% CPU performance boost and 37% better power efficiency compared with the previous-generation Elite Gen 5.
The Extreme model pushes things further. Qualcomm claims a 13% CPU performance increase, while its reworked Adreno GPU delivers up to 44% better GPU performance than the previous generation. It also gets dedicated Adreno matrix cores for running more advanced AI models directly on the GPU.
That extra hardware has some useful gaming applications, too. Qualcomm’s Adreno Neural Fusion uses those matrix cores for AI-powered super-resolution and frame generation, with the company claiming up to 40% power savings in supported games.
The standard Elite Gen 6 isn’t being left behind on efficiency. Its rearchitected Adreno GPU offers 35% better performance and 40% improved power efficiency over the Elite Gen 5.
AI is another major focus across both chips. The Hexagon NPU now includes an Element Accelerator designed for transformer workloads, with the standard chip offering 14% better NPU performance and 20% better AI performance-per-watt. The Extreme version gets 50% more shared memory, allowing it to handle Mixture of Experts models with more than 30 billion parameters, alongside 35% higher NPU performance and 33% better AI performance-per-watt.
Photography and video get upgrades through Qualcomm’s Spectra ISP, which now uses Intelligent Pixel Control to analyse scenes at a per-pixel level. The Extreme model can also handle 8K at 60fps and 4K at 240fps slow-motion video.
Both chips use Qualcomm’s new X105 5G modem, with support for 3GPP Release 19 5G Advanced and six antennas for handling multiple data streams. Qualcomm says it delivers 10% faster downlink and uplink speeds.
Motorola has already announced the Signature 27 with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, giving us an early look at where Qualcomm’s new flagship silicon is heading.
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